The first of three temporary structures that will house the Downtown Holiday Market’s pop-up shops was delivered to Black Hawk Mini Park on Wednesday afternoon. The pop-up shops are replacing the one-day tent sale that was held in the park for the past two years.
The shops open on Saturday, and over the next five weeks they will feature goods from a variety of Iowa City stores. This weekend the pop-ups will be filled by BLU Collar, Whitties Knitties and Two Ten Designs.
These first shops will only be open on Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. While the hours will stay the same, the number of days the shops are open will change starting on Nov. 30. For the final four weeks, the shops will be open from Thursday to Sunday. The full schedule for the shops, and which retailers are participating in the holiday sale, can be found on the Iowa City Downtown District’s (ICDD) site.
The ICDD solicited proposals for the pop-up shops from local architects. “We thought we should put an Iowa City twist on this, if we were going to do it,” Betsy Potter, ICDD’s director of operations, told Little Village when the shops were announced. The winning submission came from Sanjay Jani of Akar Architecture. The structures were built by Iowa City’s Hardy Lawn Furniture.
This year’s Downtown Holiday Market is sponsored by the University of Iowa Community Credit Union, which also sponsored the previous two holiday markets.
